Here are four common ways in which spammers get your email address:
Public Web pages
If your address appears on a public Web page, spammers can automatically "harvest" it using widely available software. Ads for one product say that it collects thousands of addresses hourly and is "so simple a 12-year-old could learn how to run it in 15 minutes."
Chat rooms
Use your email address in these groups and you're a target. When Consumer Reports used a newly minted email address in several chat rooms, they received their first spam within 25 minutes.
"Dictionary" attack
Some spammers send email to many addresses using combinations of names and numbers, such as John101, John102, etc. To determine how different types of email address attracts spam, Consumer Reports created short addresses and longer, harder-to-guess ones with five large Internet providers. Within six to 12 weeks, spammers had found some of the short addresses but none of the long ones.
Online registration
Disclosing your address when shopping online can unwittingly bring spam. The riskiest sites are those with no privacy policy, a statement that tells you what information the site collects on you and with whom it may share it. But even a site that posts a policy can be risky if the policy allows for sharing your address with unnamed "partners".
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